Geologists Unite Against Heresy - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 74

it, and finds that he has in his arms but a little vapor and smoke; it is at the
same time alluring and intangible.” 12 Schuchert quotes those lines from Termier's
speech but leaves out the critical next three sentences, which change the sense of
what Termier was trying to convey: “But in all reality we cannot conclude, we
cannot say,” Termier continued, “that there is really nothing in Wegener's theory;
neither can we affirm that it does not contain some truth. Our knowledge is very
limited. It is always necessary to close a lecture on geology in humility.” 13 In the
symposium volume, humility proved to be in very short supply.
Instead of retaining drift among his working hypotheses, Schuchert preferred
land bridges, in which he had “long been a believer . . . all through the Paleozoic
and Mesozoic across the Atlantic from Brazil to Africa.” 14 In two passages in par-
ticular, we perceive what motivated Schuchert's objection. First, “No paleogeo-
graphic map is worth the paper on which it is printed unless it depicts the actual
state of affairs for a limited geologic time.” 15 He aimed this statement at Wegen-
er's map of the break-up of Pangaea, but it could equally well apply to the maps
of ancient lands that Schuchert had made, all of which assumed the continents had
been anchored in place throughout geologic time. If these maps were not worth the
paper they were printed on, then much of Schuchert's work was in question.
The second clue comes from Schuchert's concluding remarks:
We are on safe ground only so long as we follow the teachings of the law of uniformity in
the operation of nature's laws. The battle over the permanency of the earth's greater features
introduced by James D. Dana has been fought and won by Americans long ago. In Europe,
however, this battle is not yet fought to a conclusion, since there are leading geologists who
still follow Lyell and believe in the impermanence of the continents and oceans, and others
who do not hesitate to push the Earth's poles anywhere in order to explain single floral or faun-
al peculiarities.
(140-141)
Parsing this paragraph, we might come up with the following: continental drift
violated uniformitarianism and permanency, obviated the need for land bridges,
falsified existing paleogeographic maps, was constructed by Europeans, and asked
Americans to refight a battle they had already won. In other words, it asked geolo-
gists to give up everything that they had learned.
E.W.Berryalsoobjected toWegener'smethod,whichhesaidwas“notscientif-
ic, but takes the familiar course of an initial idea, a selective search through the
literature for corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed
to the idea, and ending in a state of autointoxication in which the subjective idea
comes to be considered as an objective fact.” 16